Emic Models Research Articles

Influence of additive manufacturing parameters by FFF on PLA tensile strength

When na object manufactured by 3D printing goes from prototype to a functional component, it is crucial to understand the mechanical properties of the material used. This knowledge determines the resistance limits of the object. Therefore, the objective of this research was to comparatively analyze the results obtained in tensile tests of specimens constructed with polylactic acid (PLA), printed in 3D, keeping the density constant and varying two construction parameters: the layer thickness and the geometry of the internal filling. The test specimens were made on a BFB Touch – Dual head-smoke 3D printer, in accordance with ASTM D638-14. Tensile tests were carried out using an EMIC model DL10000 testing machine, and the results were statistically analyzed for comparison. The results indicated that the maximum stress and fracture resistance increased with increasing thickness of the filament deposited by the extruder nozzle. Although PLA is often described in the literature as a brittle polymer, it has exhibited ductility characteristics when 3D printed, due to the alignment of fibers during the manufacturing process.

Towards an emic model of business culture

PurposeThis paper aims to generalize emic studies of culture and thus provide indigenous view nuanced particularly for emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachThe authors review four local business frameworks and deconstruct each into three different constructs. The authors systematically evaluate culture specific studies, particularities of jaan pehchaan (India), guanxi (China), sviazi (Russia) and wasta (Arab countries).FindingsBuilding on social networking theory, the authors synthesize an emic model for four types of large emerging markets cultures – China, Russia, India and Arab countries – and divide them according to their affective, conative and cognitive elements.Practical implicationsBy knowing the impact of the constructs and how to leverage it, managers can successfully penetrate and manage these complex markets.Originality/valueCurrent models of culture, such as the ones proposed by Hofstede and GLOBE, are etic in their orientation, attempting to find variations in common dimensions across different cultures. Emic approaches to studying culture are more bottom-up and are idiosyncratic to the culture.

Pregnancy Fasting in Ramadan: Toward a Biocultural Framework

ABSTRACT Pregnancy fasting poses a paradox: why would a woman restrict her diet during a period of increased nutritional need? This qualitative, cross-sectional study applied biological and cultural evolutionary theories of pregnancy diet to emic models of fasting with the aim of establishing a testable biocultural framework of pregnancy fasting. The research took place with Muslim women residing in Mysore, India. In-depth interviews were conducted with pregnant women who have experience and knowledge of fasting during during the holy month of Ramadan. Our findings indicate that pregnancy fasting is socially acquired via multiple modes of transmission and that women do not fast according to mainstream evolutionary theories of pregnancy diet, but perhaps to gain moral capital.

Divine Resonance in Early Greek Epic: Space, Knowledge, Affect

This article reframes the cultic prohibition of sound in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 478–9 as an emic model for understanding sonic encounter with the divine in early Greek epic. It argues that these lines represent divine resonance, that is, the experience of divine sound, according to the themes of space, knowledge, and affect. This framework guides three close readings: Penelope and the eidôlon (Od. 4.830–4), Talthybios and the boar (Il. 19.249–68), and Agamemnon and the false dream (Il. 2.35–41). In these readings, the model not only enriches interpretation but also reveals that passages of varying lengths can operate as nonlinear resonant circuits in which divine resonance anticipates divine revelation.

Face and cultural conceptualizations in German-Brazilian business exchanges

Abstract Following up on recent calls for studies dealing with first-order understandings of face (Arundale 2013; Haugh 2013), this paper presents arguments in favor of an empirical investigation of cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2011) underlying these first-order (or emic) models. The arguments are based on the findings of a study on business communication in international contexts (Mendes de Oliveira 2020). The study comprises the analysis of (a) interviews with business people from different sectors and (b) a compilation of e-mails exchanged by Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company. I focus specifically on conceptualizations of ‘respect in business negotiations’ (Mendes de Oliveira 2017) as well as on their pragmatic instantiations in e-mails. For instance, the recurrent image schema vertical splitting in the Brazilian interview excerpts on the topic of respect in business negotiations is shown to be pragmatically instantiated in terms of how participants acknowledge ‘hierarchy’ in their construals of face in e-mail interactions. The image schema horizontal splitting is shown to be related to how German participants construe ‘face’ as a transactional phenomenon in the e-mail exchanges. I conclude that cultural conceptualizations play an important role in the Brazilian and German emic models of face. Future studies can take the reflections presented in this paper into consideration in order to strengthen the arguments that favor the inclusion of culturally-based views on face into an overarching theoretical model of face (Arundale 2013).

On the power of a spatial metaphor: Is female to land as male is to sea?

The spatial metaphor that links women to land and men to sea has modelled the explanations of many social scientists interested in women’s roles in the fisheries sector worldwide, which—in turn—inspired development interventions and policy development in fisheries. The metaphor is also reflected in many culturally underpinned normative emic models that structure the sexual division of labour in fishing, fish processing and marketing and in family traditions in fisher communities across cultures and countries. Building upon an ethnographic example from Galicia (Spain) and linking the analysis to global examples available in the literature, we bridge the gap between the local and the global by analysing the denials that the use of the spatial metaphor portrays. In doing so, the paper explores the dual power of this metaphor—in both etic accounts and emic models—and its performative dimensions. Whereas in some socio-cultural contexts, land-based activities can be a source of power and the spatial metaphor may be a useful tool with analytical potential; we conclude that its use may result in a denial of the variety of women’s actual roles, contributions and importance in the sector. Additionally, the metaphor removes the interconnections between spaces, blurs the liminal areas of the coastal fringe and denies diversity, including class differences. In sum, the metaphor strengthens the ideological connection between fishing and capturing fish at sea, preventing women from enjoying full rights as fishers.

Integrating Intercultural Competence development into the curriculum through Telecollaboration. A task sequence proposal for Higher Education

Despite its demonstrated potential to enhance students’ Intercultural Competence and other 21st century skills, telecollaboration still fails to be fully integrated into university courses. Literature shows that there is a need for developing sustainable instructional design models for this purpose. Hence, the main goal of this work is to propose a theory-informed task sequence to facilitate the integration of telecollaboration into university courses for the development of Intercultural Competence. Based on the typology of tasks from O’Dowd & Ware (2009) and enriched with contributions from other authors, the task sequence: (1) facilitates the development of Intercultural Competence according to EMIC model and adds a new block to its composition in order to approach the specificities of virtual teamwork, (2) contains detailed instructions for each task, (3) provides guidelines on implementation, on the selection of technology and on the integration of tasks to the syllabi and (4) offers an assessment plan, accompanied by a list of learning evidences that are expected to be manifested by students per task. This sequence can serve as a reference for further adaptations to diverse contexts. It is currently being piloted in two telecollaborative projects and the results are expected to contribute to future improvements.

Importance of monitoring the Greater Agulhas Current and its inter-ocean exchanges using large mooring arrays


 
 
 The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, using CMIP5 and EMIC model outputs suggests that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) is very likely to weaken by 11–34% over the next century, with consequences for global rainfall and temperature patterns. However, these coupled, global climate models cannot resolve important oceanic features such as the Agulhas Current and its leakage around South Africa, which a number of studies have suggested may act to balance MOC weakening in the future. To properly understand oceanic changes and feedbacks on anthropogenic climate change we need to substantially improve global ocean observations, particularly within boundary current regions such as the Agulhas Current, which represent the fastest warming regions across the world’s oceans. The South African science community, in collaboration with governing bodies and international partners, has recently established one of the world’s most comprehensive observational networks of a western boundary current system, measuring the Greater Agulhas Current System and its inter-ocean exchanges south of Africa. This observational network, through its design for long-term monitoring, collaborative coordination of resources and skills sharing, represents a model for the international community. We highlight progress of the new Agulhas System Climate Array, as well as the South African Meridional Overturning Circulation programme, which includes the Crossroads and GoodHope hydrographic transects, and the South Atlantic MOC Basin-wide Array. We also highlight some of the ongoing challenges that the programmes still face.
 
 
 
 
 Significance: 
 
 
 
 Large mooring arrays have been successfully deployed to monitor the Greater Agulhas Current system.
 Capacity development is ongoing, although established, in marine science around South Africa.
 Challenges exist with regard to retention of skilled staff, resources and funding.
 
 
 

Interpreting conflict and integration through the reciprocity lens: mobility and settlement in a historical perspective on the Sierra Leonean coast

ABSTRACTIn recent years, Sierra Leone has witnessed intense population movements. During the civil war (1991–2002), many populations fled the fighting zones of the interior to take refuge on the coast. Since the conflict ended, new populations have reached the coastal area with the hope of accessing economic opportunities in the fishing business. Mobility, along with changing sociopolitical and economic conditions, has generated conflict between immigrants and Sherbro populations, who consider themselves autochthonous and deny migrants the freedom to access political and land rights. The paper argues that present dynamics of conflicts are rooted in long-term patterns of settlement and relationships of reciprocity between groups. Relations between migrants and local populations are grounded in a sociocultural idiom that implies the institutionalization of practices of reciprocity between local inhabitants (hosts) and later settlers (strangers). The host/stranger reciprocity system is an emic model of cultural action embedded in historical and power relations between groups. It implies the progressive integration of strangers into the host society. This paper highlights how, in a situation of conflict, long-established social relationships between groups are reevaluated with reference to norms of integration and reciprocity. The paper draws on Sherbro oral traditions to show how social memories about interethnic relations are reframed with reference to values and expectations of reciprocity, in order to explain the recent conflict that opposes Sherbros to immigrants. Sherbros use oral traditions to interpret these tensions in a long-term perspective, thereby expressing their own view on settlement, conflict and integration.

‘Behaving well’: the transition to respectable womanhood in rural South Africa

Few studies of the transition to adulthood in Africa analyse young people’s own definitions of the events that confer adult status, and how adulthood is actually attained. This paper examines the experience of transitioning to womanhood in rural Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, drawing on interviews with 18 women aged 18–39. Three primary experiences characterised this transition: puberty and emerging body awareness, spending time with boys, and having a child. More important than the timing of these experiences, however, was whether women ‘behaved well’ and maintained respectability as they transitioned to adulthood. Behavioural standards reinforcing ideal femininity were focused on dress, manner and talk, and were particularly stringent for mothers. Findings emphasise the value of emic models of adulthood for understanding how youth experience this transition and provide an important counter-narrative to the literature focused primarily on the risk African youth face during this period of change in the life course.

The Empire of Japan’s Foreign Policy

The present research applies the Theory of Harmony through Holistic Engagement to the foreign policy of Japan. As the third largest economy in the world and one of the most highly developed countries in the world, Japan is a major international power. Most analysts interpret Japan’s foreign policy through the lenses of realist, exceptionalist, or liberal institutionalist approaches. All the previously mentioned approaches tend to be based on etic studies conducted from the point of view of outsiders. The present interpretation of Japanese foreign policy applies an emic model based on primary sources from the Greater East Asian region and concludes that the Model of Harmony through Holistic Engagement shows considerable explanatory traction in interpreting the direction and development of Japanese foreign policy, in particular in the last two to three decades.

From the Indian Individual to Hierarchising Discourse: Elements for a Theory of Caste

To understand caste in India we must explain the particularity of this mode of stratification, while avoiding an essentialism that isolates caste from other social forms. Stratification appeared in India long before an emic model of caste. Yet in contemporary India, I found actors concerned to place themselves in a rank order, even in ephemeral situations. I outline an Indian concept of the individual, characterised by relative immunity of the self to the social sphere, and argue that this immunity acts as a shield to keep ranking apart from the self. Indian actors show their social capability by adapting to situations rather than imposing a consistent personality across them. Local stratification is explained by actors in a historical mode, as if history was an interactional sequence played out between communities rather than individuals. Indigenous models of society provide an alternative explanatory mode, as when Brahmins claim the superior position. Their holistic model, however, is matched by king-centred and merchant-centred models. Subalterns have yet other views of Indian society. I argue that holistic models in India are constructions of the dominant, and should not be taken to represent ‘Indian culture’. Indian society should rather be seen as plural, with several emic models used to describe and explain it. Still, the tendency to create rank in so many situations points to particular rules of interaction and discourse, which implies talking ‘as if’ hierarchy, in the Dumontian sense, was an objective reality.

Folk Food Webs and the Role of Praxis in Substantive Ecological Knowledge

In the second half of the 20th century, investigations of indigenous environmental knowledge have been the subject of broader anthropological debates over how knowledge and experience are formed. Many such approaches have focused on environmental nomenclature and taxonomy, or what Roy Ellen has called “formal lexical knowledge” (1999). Such knowledge is readily available to an ethnographer and also more easily transmitted through language between subjects. These characteristics of formal lexical knowledge have led to considerable attention given to differences in environmental knowledge between cultures and have possibly resulted in the inflation of the efficacy of language in forming knowledge. However, if a different form of environmental knowledge is examined are there differences that emerge within communities and other processes beyond symbolic systems that shape knowledge? To address these questions, individuals in two Balinese agricultural communities were asked to construct food webs by linking photos of plant and animal species according to ecological interaction. The results showed significant variation in subjects’ knowledge by gender, which corresponds to labor experience in Balinese wet rice agricultural systems. By shifting attention toward emic models of ecological interactions, this article attempts to demonstrate (1) that environmental knowledge differs within a single community; and, (2) the role of labor experience or praxis has in forming environmental knowledge.

Harmony through Holistic Engagement: An Emic Model of Greater East Asian Regionalism

This study applies grounded theory to develop an emic substantive theory of regional integration in Greater East Asia. The role of norms and policies is explored through discursive content analysis of a wide theoretical sample of official elite policy statements dealing with regionalism and related policy areas. A resulting model of regional integration titled "Harmony through Holistic Engagement" is then discussed in relation to the etic consensus on the phenomenon. The study concludes that the etic consensus on the nature of regional integration in Greater East Asia greatly differs from the results of an emic approach and thus reflects a normative consensus rather than a descriptive reality.

A framework for understanding grocery purchasing in a low-income urban environment.

Research demonstrates that food desert environments limit low-income shoppers' ability to purchase healthy foods, thereby increasing their likelihood of diet-related illnesses. We sought to understand how individuals in an urban American food desert make grocery-purchasing decisions, and specifically why unhealthy purchases arise. Analysis is based on ethnographic data from participant observation, 37 in-depth interviews, and three focus groups with low-income, primarily African American shoppers with children. We found participants had detailed knowledge of and preference for healthy foods, but the obligation to consistently provide food for their families required them to apply specific decision criteria which, combined with structural qualities of the supermarket environment, increased unhealthy purchases and decreased healthy purchases. Applying situated cognition theory, we constructed an emic model explaining this widely shared grocery-purchasing decision process and its implications. This context-specific understanding of behavior suggests that multifaceted, system-level approaches to intervention are needed to increase healthy purchasing in food deserts.

The FAMOUS climate model (versions XFXWB and XFHCC): description update to version XDBUA

Abstract. FAMOUS is an ocean-atmosphere general circulation model of low resolution, based on version 4.5 of the UK MetOffice Unified Model. Here we update the model description to account for changes in the model as it is used in the CMIP5 EMIC model intercomparison project (EMICmip) and a number of other studies. Most of these changes correct errors found in the code. The EMICmip version of the model (XFXWB) has a better-conserved water budget and additional cooling in some high latitude areas, but otherwise has a similar climatology to previous versions of FAMOUS. A variant of XFXWB is also described, with changes to the dynamics at the top of the model which improve the model climatology (XFHCC).

Constraints of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Natural Subject

AbstractIn this paper, I take aim at the typical anthropological routine of criticizing universalist assumptions in social theory by contrasting them with non-Western emic models. I do so by following up on one recent instance of this practice, which has been heralded as a testament to what anthropology can still offer to critical social theory: Mahmood’s work on the Islamic piety movement in Egypt, and her claim that the normative subject of liberal feminist theory needs to be denaturalized, because the women involved in the piety movement hold a self-model that is incommensurable with secular-liberal assumptions about action being structured by innate desires for autonomy and freedom. By analyzing ethnographic data on Egyptian Muslim women through the lens of a combination of non-determinist cognitive theories, I show that in order to understand the lives of pious women much can be gained from keeping psychological predispositions for autonomy in mind. Simultaneously, this paper can be read as an attempt to bring cognitive material on attachment, education and epidemiology of representations into conversation with one another, and discover emerging fault lines and potentialities for mutual reinforcement.

Capital Possession: a comparative approach to 'New Age' and control of the means of possession

This paper reconsiders academic representations of religious phenomena that have been called New Age through contextualised comparison of social practice and discourse. This challenges both the replication of emic models of a New Age in terms that are abstract, classed and racialised, and the way in which the New Age is represented as a social phenomenon unrelated to other contemporary religious forms throughout the world. By identifying spirit possession as a central practice within what is called ‘non-formative religion’, comparisons are drawn with Pentecostalism and Shamanism, documenting their growth under common conditions of neoliberal globalisation across the world. To examine reasons for such resurgence, attention is drawn to what is called the ‘means of possession’: the social contexts in which possession occurs and is controlled. The ambiguity by which control of the means of possession is exercised is explored in terms of a broader social context in which self-authority is both denied and demanded.

Attitudes towards mental health in an urban Pakistani community in the United Kingdom.

The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of Pakistani families living in an urban area of the United Kingdom, towards mental health issues, to identify the emic models used and compare them with the etic model, predominant in Western medicine. This would allow the exploration of some of the inconsistencies in the research literature relating to the incidence of mental illness in this cultural group. The second aim was to explore the needs of this community, particularly women, in relation to mental health services. Due to problems gaining access to females on their own, interviews were held with family groups. Findings suggested that there were differences in the models of mental illness being employed with greater somatisation of symptoms in the Pakistani group and an emphasis on aggressive behaviour as a significant symptom. Treatment expectations also varied with some emphasis on traditional Pakistani treatments such as Faith healers and Hakims as well as General Practitioners and hospital treatments. Language difficulties, religious and cultural practices were also identified as barriers to female treatment in particular. Recommendations were made for improved training for interpreters and more emphasis on cultural factors and emic models of mental illness as part of medical training.

“The show must go on”: Behind the scenes of elderly spousal caregiving

Based on interviews with ten caregivers and on observations of their daily behavior, the present article sets out to clarify why, despite the burdens of care-giving, elderly individuals care for their spouses at home, even when the option to institutionalize them is available. Unlike traditional ways of approaching this question, founded on emic models, the analysis presented in this article is mainly an etic one, based on the dramaturgical approach. The findings indicate that caregiving is a stage for self-deceptive playacting, allowing caregivers to suspend time, awareness, and anxiety in a way that would not have been possible had they institutionalized their spouses. The study shows that features of caregiving, usually portrayed as burdens and hardships, serve in fact as coping mechanisms, which may explain elderly people's willingness to care for their spouses in their own homes.